"[S]ome
Congressmen probably would vote for a declaration of war
against Canada if it were contained in a bill with the
words `civil rights` in its title." [`Civil
Rights` That Can Lead to Civil War, By Thomas
Sowell, New York Daily News, April 24, 1990), p.
30, quoted in
Paved With Good Intentions, p. 151]

Instead, Bush made the climax of
his speech a demand that the Senate pass a 25-year
extension of the Voting Rights Act without amendment.

The Senate instantly complied by a
vote of
98-0 (following the House`s passage by the margin of
390-33).

As a substantive bill, the VRA
extension was notable for insisting that
foreign language ballots be provided to voters who
need them.

Yet, to become a U.S. citizen,
immigrants are
legally required to prove that they are literate in
English. So the need for a non-English ballot would
appear to be prima facie proof that an immigrant
either fraudulently became a citizen or that he is a
noncitizen attempting to
vote fraudulently. [Vdare.com
Note: Jack Kemp
claims that Republicans
who oppose the VRA are Know-Nothings.
He would. He also
claims that 70 percent of the non-English speaking
voters are born in the US, which, if it`s true, is an
indictment of Kemp`s
Open Borders policy
over the last twenty years.]

But President Bush and the
solons of the Senate aren`t concerned about mere
logic when they can revel in one of the more popular
rituals of 21st century political theatre:
pretending that Southern white racism is
omnipresent, a pervasive threat to blacks` right to
vote.

This 25-year VRA extension , which
President Bush swore to the NAACP that he would sign,
requires
nine states, seven of them Southern, to get the
Justice Department`s approval for any change in voting
rules to
make sure that "the change did not have a
discriminatory purpose and would not have a
discriminatory effect."

Thus, the mark of Cain will
officially be upon the South into the 2030s for evils
that disappeared by the 1970s.

In reality, as Thomas Sowell
pointed out back in the pre-Internet days, the 1965
Voting Rights Act was the most quickly successful of the
civil rights era landmarks.

In contrast, Sowell argued, the
denial of the vote to Southern blacks was an obvious
violation of the
15th Amendment, and it wasn`t as much of an
emotional hot button for the public since it involved
the
fates of politicians, not their own children. Soon
after Congress finally passed the Voting Rights Act in
1965, rabble-rousing white Southern politicians either
saw their careers come to a quick end now that everyone
could vote, or, like
George Wallace, they changed their tune. So, there
was no more organized resistance to civil rights.

In other words, the effectiveness
of the initial Voting Rights Act in the 1965-1969 era
was because, once it dismantled the
various subterfuges that kept Southern blacks from
voting, blacks possessed enough
political power to make black voting rights
self-enforcing.

And more than
self-enforcing—witness ceremonies like last week`s 98-0
Senate vote.

We`re coming up on the tenth
anniversary of California voters` approval of
Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action 1996
initiative authored by
Glynn Custred and Tom Wood, and chaired by Ward
Connerly.

Like Brown, Prop. 209 was
greeted by massive resistance by the entrenched
California establishment. Also like Brown, but
unlike the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Prop. 209 didn`t
alter who held political power, so the powers-that-be
that had erected all the racial quotas in the first
place continued to, well, Be. Not surprisingly, these
powers subsequently attempted multiple end runs around
the clear language of the law.

Only 3.0 percent of
white and Asian applicants were admitted versus 10.4
percent of blacks and Hispanics, even though the
"underrepresented minority" admittees had much lower
grades and test scores.

Due to the tenacity of a few UC
Regents such as Connerly and
John Moores, and the pro bono lawsuits filed by the
Pacific Legal Foundation, progress has been made
since then in getting the University of California to
follow the law.

Still, the creativity of the
diversicrats at evading the will of the people
remains remarkable.

Early in this decade, for instance,
the UC colleges adopted "comprehensive review" of
applicants, authorizing them to hand out admission not
just for grades and test scores, but also for
"overcoming adversity"—including having been
shot! (Hint: Victims of
hunting accidents need not apply.)

To get around the identical
problem, in 1966, the Supreme Court upheld Section 5 of
the original VRA, which mandated Justice Department
oversight of the any changes in the law,
saying:

"Congress had found that case-by-case litigation was
inadequate to combat wide-spread and persistent
discrimination in voting, because of the inordinate
amount of time and energy required to overcome the
obstructionist tactics invariably encountered in these
lawsuits. After enduring nearly a century of systematic
resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress might
well decide to shift the advantage of time and inertia
from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims." [SOUTH
CAROLINA v. KATZENBACH 383 U.S. 301 (1966)]